I heard Sarah's dad yell before I even pushed the doorbell. "Sarah! Your little friend's here!" He must have heard me walk up the porch. I stood up a little straighter and smiled, waiting for him to open the door. Not that he would have noticed my posture or expression anyway - he was blind - but whenever I was at Sarah's I always wanted to look my best.
"Kelly!" he said to me in his big voice, and ushered me inside.
"Hi Mr. McAllan. It's good to see you again. Is Sarah up in her room?" I shifted my backpack from one shoulder to the other as I talked. It was heavy, and I was horribly nervous.
"Sure is! Been up there all morning, only came down for breakfast." He paused and cocked his head to the side for a minute, as if to listen for Sarah's protest from upstairs. He always seemed to forget that nobody else in the house could hear the things he could. "You girls must have an awful lot of work to do on that English presentation, eh?"
I blushed hard and ducked my head – Thank God he couldn't see me! "Uh, yeah, I guess we kinda waited till the last minute. Guess I should head up there, huh?" I said, already making for the stairs.
Mr. McAllan laughed and turned toward the den. "Don't work too hard up there, you two!" he boomed, as much for Sarah's benefit as mine. "Try and have a little fun!" I ran up the stairs as fast as I could.
At Sarah's door I stopped, my right hand brushing the knob, my left clenched almost painfully tight around my backpack strap, fingernails white digging into the nylon. "Is this what you want?" I thought. I still wasn't sure, and I was so scared.
"Kelly?" I heard Sarah say softly from the other side of the door. "If it's you, come in." Her voice sounded as shaky as I felt, and somehow that made me feel better. I opened the door and walked in.
Sarah was lying on her bed, covers pulled up to her chin. She smiled at me when I came in, and I smiled back. I turned back to pull the door shut, and when I looked at her again, she was sitting up on the bed, naked. I dropped my backpack on the floor. We stayed like that, her on the bed and me by the door, for what felt like hours.
"Well?" she said finally, trying to sound lighthearted. "What are you waiting for?" And I started to unbutton my pants.
I had met Sarah the previous semester, the fall. We were both freshman English students, and so we had most of our classes together. I noticed her right away – she was so small, so pale with her copper hair, so timid but quick to smile. I always notice girls like that, so different from me, the big brown-haired jock. I thought she was beautiful.
She was smart, too. Smarter than me, at any rate. That's how I got to know her. I was failing pre-cal, our required math, and the prof. steered me in her direction as a study partner. I marched right up to her after class, before she could get her books together and scurry out like she always did.
"Hey. Sarah, right?" I held out my hand, just like a guy. I always do that. Habit, I guess. "I'm Kelly." She shook my hand and smiled, shyly. I waited for her to say something, but she just stood there, waiting and smiling her little smile.
"Hey, so, Dr. Chang says you're doing really well in class, and, well, I'm not, and so, I was wondering if, you know..."God, why was I so nervous? I think it was the way she just stood there, looking me right in the eyes and smiling like that. I felt like I was asking her on a date. "Anyway, I thought maybe I could study with you? If you wouldn't mind?" I finally got it out and then made myself shut up, before I sounded even more stupid.
"Sure," she said, the first time I'd ever heard her speak. Her voice was soft and pretty. Not high-pitched or breathy – sweet, like a note played on a flute. "I'd be happy to have someone to study with." She smiled again, and I smiled too. I followed her out to the library, and that was that.
We became friends quickly. Sarah's one of those people it's impossible not to like, at least for me. She's funny in her quiet way, and not nearly as fragile as she seemed at first glance. At first, I did all the talking, filling up the long silences between us with my life story: details of volleyball matches, which professor I was pissed off at this week, what a shitty lay my ex-boyfriend was (and he was), stuff like that. But soon enough she began to open up to me and tell me about her life. About how her mom had, without any warning, one day woken up and decided she deserved better than her blind husband and teenaged daughter, and walked out on them, not to be heard from since. About how Mr. McAllan had packed them both up and moved them here in the middle of her senior year in high school, leaving her no time to make friends before college, no time to find a boy who would take her to prom. And now here she was in college, still no boyfriend, still no friends – except me.
"Yeah, but you could get a guy in two seconds flat if you wanted," I said. We were at lunch in the UC, splitting a double cheeseburger and fries. We were both pretty broke. "You're gorgeous!" I meant it to sound teasing, but it came out sounding much more sincere than I'd hoped. I blushed and shoved a big piece of burger into my mouth, so maybe she would think I'd been joking.
She shook her head. "I'm not, really, "she said. "But it's not even that. It's...the other thing." Now, it was her turn to blush.
"You mean, being a virgin? Oh, please!" I laughed a little and took her hand. "I don't think any guy's really going to care about that."
"I care," she said. "I don't want to make an idiot out of myself. And I'm scared it's going to hurt." She stopped to take a sip of our soda, then looked around quickly to see if there was anybody close to us. She leaned over the table to me, so close I could smell her shampoo. I started to get a little breathless, without knowing why. She opened her mouth, hesitated, then said "Would you help me, Kelly?"
